When a new release of Ubercart gets posted and you're itching to try it out on your site, you should consider the following pointers to make sure you don't end up with a disaster on your hands. While we do test updates between release versions ourselves, it's better to be safe than sorry!

Review the release announcement for special instructions. Most updates are going to be simple affairs, but sometimes there are specific actions you'll have to take to update to the latest version. If you're updating across multiple new releases (like from Alpha 8 to Beta 4), review the release notes for the intermediate releases, too.

Back up your database and module directory. This really is essential, as it will protect you from the headache of an update gone wrong destroying your database. In the event of a failure, you can easily revert to your previous settings and files.

Overwrite your old Ubercart folder with the new module folders. This will ensure you don't miss an update. We'll let you know if a module gets moved that would require you to remove a previous directory manually.

Run update.php. This is done by logging in as user 1 and browsing to http://www.example.com/update.php. Follow the instructions to perform the updates. You shouldn't have to adjust any of the select box values for update versions, as the script automatically chooses the latest one.

Look at the results and report any bugs you encounter. Not all failure messages will be bugs, but you can post your questions in the forums just too make sure. Please review the recent posts to make sure no one else has reported the same issue before starting a new thread.

I would like to say that you might also encounter bugs where, after running update.php, you get a lot of page not found errors, or array_keys errors showing up in the Watchdog table (but you won't be able to view Watchdog's Drupal interface). If this happens, as it happened to me, simply emptying the cache_menu database table will solve the issue.